Asia Pacific editor for Fairfax Media

Professor Geremie Barmé from the ANU's Australian Centre on China in the World.

BEIJING has complained to Canberra about the contents and title of a university publication, Red Rising, Red Eclipse, triggering stinging rebukes about the ''harassment'' of Australian scholars and threats to democratic values.

Chinese diplomats complained to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Australian National University's Australian Centre on China in the World about an alleged lack of balance in the centre's China Story Yearbook 2012.

They also blocked internet access to the report from mainland China.

Front cover of the book.

In return, the Chinese embassy received a 13-page lecture about diplomacy, free speech and Maoism from the centre's director, Geremie Barmé, one of the world's leading sinologists.

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''I for one do not see how such a crude interdiction benefits mutual understanding [and] respect,'' wrote Professor Barmé in a letter dated November 14.

His decision this week to reveal the Chinese pressure and publish his letter on the centre's website has underscored thorny issues about free speech, just as the Chinese Communist Party is flexing its economic and diplomatic muscles in the world.

Stephen FitzGerald, who was Australia's inaugural ambassador to Beijing in 1972, said the Chinese government may have expected the Australian government to reprimand the university and the centre over the publication, despite Australian norms of academic independence.

''What we've got here is the clash of values,'' Mr FitzGerald said.

He applauded Professor Barmé's decision to publicly uphold ''what they stand for, in terms of free speech and intellectual and academic freedom''.

The incident echoes efforts by Chinese diplomats in July 2009 to prevent the Melbourne Film Festival from screening a documentary about an exiled leader of China's ethnic Uighur people, Rebiya Kadeer, which triggered an international storm.

The Fairfax journalist who broke that story, former Beijing correspondent Mary-Anne Toy, has since been denied tourist visas to enter China.

This week the Communist Party took the rare measure of effectively expelling a resident journalist, Australian citizen Chris Buckley, together with his family.

The failure to renew Mr Buckley's media accreditation was an apparent act of retaliation against a New York Times story about the family wealth of Premier Wen Jiabao.

Mr Buckley's wife and daughter have also been forced to leave mainland China, despite their respective work and school commitments.

A November survey by the Foreign Correspondents Club of China revealed that 20 of its members had been forced to wait more than four months for accreditation.

The treatment is in contrast to the unfettered access that Chinese journalists and scholars are given in Australia and other nations. The majority of Australia's Chinese-language media is controlled or closely linked to the Chinese government. More than 650 Chinese government journalists are working in the United States alone.

The Australian Centre on China in the World was opened by former prime minister Kevin Rudd in 2010 and visited that year by Xi Jinping, who has recently been promoted to general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, a top political and military position.

The yearbook, launched in August by former Treasury secretary Ken Henry, provides multiple perspectives and case studies on contemporary China, including the rise and apparent decapitation of China's neo-Maoist movement with the purge of Politburo member Bo Xilai.

The yearbook also contains views from Communist Party officials, such as a People's Daily summation of China's ''golden decade''.

''We believe that it is important to act as if the people's republic had already sloughed off the vestiges of Cold War-era and Maoist attitudes, behaviour and language,'' Professor Barmé wrote.

''We engage with the People's Republic as if it enjoyed an environment like that of any other mature, open and equitable society … as if such comments and criticisms were not a result of ideological bullying nor merely the product of fearful bureaucratic fiat or the desire to avoid possible official embarrassment.

''We act as if the rhetoric of friendship, understanding and shared concerns were a reality.''

Former ambassador FitzGerald delivered a speech to the centre in November in which he raised the need to ''be tough and have courage in your values'' when dealing with China, just as toughness and independence were required when dealing with the United States.

''The Chinese position was that its rights should override any rights we had, in these cases China's right to direct how it is seen, presented and understood in Australia,'' he said, referring to the incident involving Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer.

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